ONCE UPON A TIME: Adam Horowitz and Eddy Kitsis Tease the End of Season 2

We’re down to the final hours of ONCE UPON A TIME’s second season, and there’s a lot of stuff going on before the year comes to a close.

OUAT showrunners Adam Horowitz and Eddy Kitsis talked with reporters earlier this week and delivered quite a few teases about what’s to come…

What the heck is the “Home Office”?

With Greg and Tamara’s mission in Storybrooke much more complex than a simple personal vendetta, a location/person called the “Home Office” is brought up. So what the heck is going on with that?

“You will find out this season,” Kitsis teased. “You will find out in the finale, and hopefully it’s not what you think…You will get an answer with a question…you will find out who the home office is, you will find out what they want, but you won’t know why…Since we’ve all been trained with Initiatives [Kitsis and Horowitz worked on LOST, which had the Dharma Initiative], we’re hoping to lead you down a different path.”

And yes, Greg and Tamara will play a big role in the audience discovering these truths…but whether they survive the season is TBD.

“Tamara and Greg will be wrapped up in this,” Horowitz said. “They’re here for a mission, and whether or not they succeed in that mission will be in the finale…By the end of this season, you’ll know a lot more about what Greg and Tamara are trying to achieve, who they are working for, and what that means for everyone in Storybrooke.”

But since they’ve already manipulated Hook into helping work out their plot, could anyone else we know secretly be a part of their plot? “Anything is possible,” Kitsis noted.

Bae and his connection to Neverland:

In tonight’s brand new episode, viewers will get to see how Bae/Neal met Wendy Darling (AKA, the same girl who is a part of the Peter Pan stories), and as Kitsis pointed out, that backstory will also reflect a bit on Neal’s current relationships.

“I think obviously you can see that Emma reminds him of Wendy,” Kitsis noted. “So what happens between him, and Wendy and the Darling family is kind of the emotional touchstone for what these last two hours are. And so it hopefully informs who he is as a character, but to also set up another land which is also, hopefully, not what you think it is.”

The showrunners were a little bit more coy when they were questioned whether we might see Wendy in present day time.

“I would be disappointed if…we introduced her and never showed what happened,” Kitsis said.

“Wendy’s a very big part of the Peter Pan mythology,” Horowitz pointed out. “Now as we pull that mythology into the ONCE UPON A TIME mythology, yeah, I’d be disappointed to not have more of her.”

So about that curse trigger…

“The device is an erase button that returns Storybrooke to what it once was, so everybody involved in it will die,” Kitsis said. “Unfortunately for Regina, she’s now strapped to a table, and the two people who have it seem to be hellbent on getting rid of this town.”

That…does not bode well.

The fight for Rumple:

Rumple might have spent a good number of years fixated on reuniting with his son, but now that Neal is near, he’s been slacking a bit in the father department.

“He’s clearly on a bender with Lacey, he’s clearly abandoned his son,” Kitsis said. “Our characters like to repeat their own mistakes, because I think as humans, we constantly repeat our own mistakes…the characters, as you see with the villains this year, they’re all trying to go on the straight and narrow. And none of them can seem to get off the [path they were on].”

“The question also is he seems to be enjoying Lacey because she lets him be who he wants to be,” he elaborated. “But his son is who he wants to be better for. So it’s which one of those will win at the end of the year? I would say that’s the internal showdown for Mr. Gold.”

What will Snow’s dark heart prompt her to do?

The darkness in Snow’s heart — caused by her decision to set in motion Cora’s death — hasn’t really been touched on in the past few episodes, but it will set some things into play in the final hours of season 2.

“I think it’s really starting to motivate her and push her; there’s a lot of feelings of guilt for what she’s done,” Horowitz said. “And she sees a tough road ahead of her, which is how do I heal this dark heart?”

And a few more teases…

The penultimate episode of the season focuses a lot on Bae/Neal, the flashback for the finale will have a connected, but different focus: “We can say the finale is very Hook-centric in the flashback,” Kitsis teased.

And we will be meeting someone new in the final hours of the season who will be sticking around.

“We’re only going to meet one person this year who will definitely be in season 3,” Kitsis noted. “[But] we may get a few people returning [from earlier episodes].”